IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR: TRACY BONHAM'S WAX & GOLD

This feature appeared in Huffington Post in September 2015

The internet is the jewel. For me, it is the link between me and my fans, who are like family. Back in the 1990s I kind of imagined what my audience was like. And 20 years later my idea of what my audience is changed. It may be only 500 or a 1000 people or more — but those people really care, and they get my jokes, and they want to hear from me. — Tracy Bonham

I last spoke with Tracy Bonham in the year 2000 in a bygone era previous to YouTube.com, Facebook, Pinterest, Tinder, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Ashley Madison, Twitter, and Huffington Post, among other modern day necessities — give or take a few. At that particular point in time, Ms. Bonham faced the daunting task of following up her pivotal debut album; the multiple Grammy Award nominated, highly acclaimed and most influential Burdens of Being Upright (1996) which featured the anthem which brought Tracy to the mainstream masses (and the Howard Stern radio show) — “Mother Mother.”

The album we discussed in the waning days of the Clinton administration was entitled Down Here — which was victim to the seismic shifts that eventually rendered the record industry as we knew it obsolete. Regardless, Tracy continued to wax music that mattered in the ensuing years. Bee (2003), Blink The Brightest(2005), and Masts of Manhatta (2010), and assorted EP and single releases which are all exemplary singer-songwriter efforts which traverse folk, pop, jazz, blues, and “alternative rock” — whatever that means.

She performed extensively with Blue Man Group, sang with Aerosmith, excelled in the violin chair with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and she teaches music, to cite a few artistic endeavors. And Tracy is currently creating a children’s music education curriculum “ala School House Rock, but instead of themes like English grammar and U.S. politics it is about music theory and ear training. I am already teaching classes and have an album almost finished that I plan on releasing in the next year which will be posted and publicized on my website and my social media pages.” 

For those of you who have never met Ms. Bonham, don’t let the “Mother Mother” legend intimidate you. (Tracy sounded genuinely surprised when I informed her that her seminal composition airs incessantly on 1990s retrospectives.) She’s very funny, given to self-effacing humor, greatly appreciative of her artistic and commercial accomplishments, and, in my opinion, is on a path wherein she can navigate this mess of a music industry into a something that artists of her ilk can actually work with. It takes a mother to fix things.

Nowadays Tracy and her husband split their time between their beloved Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York with their son, an Ethiopian boy which the couple recently adopted. Parenthood and family is a theme which runs through her new album Wax & Gold - a title which derives its name from Ethiopian literature and culture which details a way of telling stories that put forth dual meanings — “wax” for the superficial meaning, “gold” for the true meaning.

Lyrically there are a lot of specifics, but it’s mostly about how we all got here. I’m sure that mothers and fathers whose children came out of the womb and have been in the household from day one often look at their child and say ‘how did you get here? Who are you? For us, there is a lot of mystery but I do get this beautiful tapestry - there is a whole other history which he came from and we get to learn about it and we get to discover it and we get to bring our family history to his tapestry and we’re making this crazy colorful quilt, which are universal themes for all parents.

An intimate show at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York City to introduce Wax & Gold was a family reunion of sorts. I reconnected with a few former music industry faces, fellow musicians, and East Village dwellers who moved out of town due to the never-ending rent increases which continue to force artists out of the neighborhood which they made famous. Many now have families of their own and were thrilled that they found babysitters for a weekday evening. Accompanying Ms. Bonham on stage was an extraordinary cellist, Gabriel Royal — a dapper young dude whom Tracy discovered busking and crooning on the 2nd Avenue Subway. Bonham, ever the comedienne, chided him about his age and his good looks — which did not go unnoticed by the moms in the room who kept waitresses busy with multiple alcohol orders and applauded Mr. Royal rather fervently for his ace accompaniment, among other attributes. As Tracy rendered her new lyrics and melodies, the audience responded immediately. Apparently with age comes a shared wisdom.

Tracy’s family, and her family of fans also correlates to her family of peer artists and band members. “Well, as far as the Woodstock family sector goes there is an incredible mix of musicians - from the likes of John Medeski to Don Byron to Donald Fagan to Rachael Yamagata, Natalie Merchant, Mike and Ruthy, and Josh Ritter. The list goes on. People in general want to hide out when they escape from tour, or escape from the city and move to the country, so over the years it has been a challenge to get people to come out of their cocoons. But there is a venue that seems to have brought people together, the Bearsville Theater. It is a historic venue, built by Bob Dylan’s manager Allan Grossman as part of the Bearsville complex with a radio station, a recording studio and a few restaurants. This little hub of music inspired businesses over the years has brought in a multitude of national as well as local acts. Over the years, since Jason and I have moved there, I have been a part of several benefit shows, raising money for people affected by Hurricane Irene - which hit hard up here. These people come out to play together and that is when I feel like I am the luckiest person in the world to have a place in that community.” From “potluck” dinners with her Woodstock neighbors to impromptu barn concerts transmitted over the internet, Ms. Bonham revels in her society of “musicians, misfits, and mystics.”

Conversely we also have producer / guitarist / recording artist Kevin Salem, renowned for his work with Yo La Tengo and Boys Against Girls to name drop a few familiar references, to thank for Wax & Gold. A highly respected member of Bonham’s aforementioned musical community — it was Salem who proclaimed “Bonham, what’s your problem! Why does it take you five years every single time you put an album out!?” Bonham, who is quick with rejoinders when we converse every fifteen years or so admits that she had no answer. As such Salem commenced Tracy on a three-day-per-week schedule to get the proverbial ball ofWax & Gold rolling. “I had known his name forever from the Boston scene” she notes “I enjoyed his music, I enjoyed his solo albums. When we met it was like we were best friends from day one. I knew he was going to be someone who was important in my life. He met my son and within minutes they were wrestling on the grass! I knew ‘Uncle Kevin’ had arrived.”

A lot of what transpires on Wax & Gold occurred organically. Case in point: while attending a Halloween party at her son’s school, Tracy heard a baritone sax and accordion playing together afar in a field. It was Jay Collins jamming for kids with a mutual friend, Marco Benevento, simply for the pure joy of entertaining the children. Tracy loved what she’d heard and invited Collins to a session wherein his horn and flute work transformed “Noonday Demon” from a bluesy groove exercise into a swingin’ jazz tune. Though she considers it to be somewhat of an anomaly, to my ears it sits well within her canon. “It’s my absolute favorite song, so I made it the first track... it’s a great way to start an album.”

An additional catalyst on the session dates was her longtime bassist Mike DuClos. “He tries out a whole bunch of ideas like a Paul McCartney free-for-all - and then he starts refining his parts — he’ll look at me on the first day and say “don’t worry — don’t worry...” He’ll see my eyebrows go up when I think ‘God he’s overplaying!’ Then he just trims the fat and I’m left with the most tasteful bass lines I’ve ever heard.”

Wax & Gold was borne of the Pledge Music crowd funding platform. That is, Tracy’s fans financed the recording and release of Wax & Gold. Depending on the amount pledged, fans received various versions of the “album “— ranging from the hard-copy CD and downloads to vinyl pressings to assorted bonus tracks, demos and other perks including an acoustic house concert, a full band concert, and “Karaoke Night with Tracy and Kevin Salem.”

As such Ms. Bonham is, in my view, is helping to redefine the concept of the album as an art-form and as a product in the market-place wherein streaming is now the norm and artists are paid pennies on pennies on pennies on the dollar.

Emphasizes Tracy “an album can be a lot of different things now- not just ten set songs. I’m not even sure if the album is valuable anymore.” Of course, Ms. Bonham had the benefit of mass exposure under the old record company business model, but she does stress that new artists can still earn an audience. Is it the best of times? Worst of times?

If you want to have creative freedom and you don’t want to deal with the big machine that was the music industry with moguls taking you out to dinner and making you feel like more than what you are, then drop you just as fast, and you don’t want to deal with the hyper-inflated bullshit; then this is the best of times. Because you can literally do anything you want. You can make a record in your bedroom, put it out, get a Twitter account and the world is yours. Sure there is luck involved but there is also perseverance and energy which you have to put into it.

She pauses. “And that’s what I would tell a 20-year-old. Yet to somebody my age — I’m not going to say it’s ‘the worst of times’ — but the old model is obsolete — you just can’t look at it like that anymore — you cannot look at it from the perspective of the old days because that’s gone forever.”

Tracy’s Wax & Gold videos are accruing views aplenty, her gigs bring in the faithful as well as younger ears, and she’s found a business model that works. “It is a lot of work but I feel it is a conversation with people who ‘get me’ — and that’s the fun of doing this right now!”

Tracy Bonham’s Wax & Gold is out now and available on iTunes, Amazon.

Tracy Bonham will be performing at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York City on Monday, October 5, 2015 at 8:00 PM on Stage 3, and on Monday, November 16, 2015 at 7:00 PM on Stage 3.

She will also be appearing at the Brooklyn Bowl on September 27, 2015 in the Daniel Cho Memorial Concert which commences at 8:00 PM. And Tracy will be live at the Northern California Women’s Music Festival on Saturday, October 24, 2015 in Modesto, California.

Tracy Bonham Photo credit: Franco Vogt

SAL CATALDI: A WIZARD A TRUE STAR IN NEW YORK CITY

This feature appeared in Huffington Post New York September 2015

“I love variety and I think listeners do too! I love Django, progressive rock master Jan Akkerman, Jimi Hendrix, and John McLaughlin, ECM guitar greats Terje Rypdal and Steve Tibbets, folkies like Nick Drake, Pierre Bensusan and John Martyn, country, noise, ‘avant skronk,’ you name it! You have to give your listeners credit in that they like lots of things and variety, so why not give it on one album? I think it’s for people with open ears who can find the value in metal tones and ‘whammys’ and classic music, ‘out’ jazz, and Americana. When it comes to listeners, I think they’re way ahead of the gate keepers... corporate radio and today’s mega-record companies. They’re the ones who want to put things in neat little boxes, genres, not the listeners I want to appeal to.” Sal Cataldi

Millions, if not billions, of folks are unaware of the fact that Sal Cataldi has forged a presence in their collective and individual conscious by way of his decidedly eccentric career at the helm of Cataldi Public Relations wherein he and his staff have shaped several award winning guerilla marketing campaigns that defy convention. We have all journeyed to the center of Sal’s mind by way of television, radio, print, social, and digital media. It’s the stuff of pop culture that we the people of New York City continually debate, embrace, are fascinated by, oft imitate, and sometimes reject, but never forget.

Yet Sal’s laudable media career is, to my ears, interchangeable with his watershed canon as a multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, composer, producer, performer, and conceptual artist. His works on stage and in the studio with The Hari Karaoke Trio of Doom - which Sal describes as an “industrial/ambient jazz dub extravaganza” with drummer Doug Hitchcock and fretless bass virtuoso Percy Jones of Brand X and Eno renown; along with avant-jazz Afro-funk collective Collector, Brooklyn comedy rockers Frank’s Museum; The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players; and in the guitar orchestra of pioneering No Wave minimalist Rhys Chatham on his A Crimson Grail - Live at Lincoln Center (Nonesuch Records, 2011) collection, among other projects, are all worthy of exploration. When Manhattanites of a certain ilk carp o’er a New York City music scene which they claim has died and gone to Brooklyn, they should follow Sal Cataldi around. And he gigs in Brooklyn as well; so you have been warned!

Mr. Cataldi’s his latest endeavor arrives under the banner of Spaghetti Eastern Music, a moniker inspired by his reverence of conductor, orchestrator, and iconic macaroni flick soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone coupled with his modus operandi of “noodling and creating an environment where the guitar could do all the talking.” Sal’s Spaghetti Eastern Music album, with both instrumental and vocal tracks, is aptly titled Sketches of Spam - a phrase which derives from his fandom of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Eric Idle, and Frank Zappa. “I am a huge fan of that kind of lush environmental music, proto-ambient, if you will. Funny thing is I had this title floating in my head for ten years before I made the album. And in that time, ‘spam’ means something completely different now to many people - junk mail vs. canned meat that soldiers ate in World War II.”

Though Sketches of Spam is a genre traversing song-cycle which simultaneously embraces and deconstructs folk, jazz, fusion, ambient, drum ‘n’ bass, metal, funk, punk, blues, and every permutation thereof - and many of which have yet to be tagged - Cataldi’s diverse compositions hang together as a collection, which is a rare feat in any generation of modern recorded music.

Sal’s alternative guitar tuning rendition of John Lennon’s “Ticket to Ride,” replete with harmonic overtones and a restated melody which floats over the bar-line quotes Delta blues with a tinge of Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Fusion fanatics, myself included, will revel in the revved up “Slaka’s Sambo Sox” which Sal reveals to be founded upon “frenetic stop-time beats ala Alan Foster on Miles’ Agharta meeting a drone/mantra and serpentine fuzz guitar from the early Mahavishnu school.” Guitar players note that Cataldi actually pulls off John McLaughlin’s proclivity for playing in and out of time on that track.

Some of Sal’s Spam servings are also complimented by YouTube videos. Among those that struck me as essential include the visuals for “Slaka’s Sambo Sox” which juxtaposes ravenous varmints, competitive gluttons, and ravishing gridiron side-line entertainers. “It’s visual Dada, sublimely, watchable ridiculousness!” proclaims Sal. “Making a video, I just find images that match the mood. This is the great Coney Island hot dog eater Kobayashi battling a hamster in an eating contest, then you have speeded-up cheerleaders and, my favorite, a video of a dryer basically whirling with a brick inside until it falls apart. It’s really eye-candy, bizarre sweets, to make the listening experience fun.”

“NY Expats/Henry Miller Says” melds a spoken word diatribe from the iconic American writer as captured by writer/director Tom Schiller which resonates rather profoundly in the present day. Sal emphasizes, “well, like a lot of gents in their early 20s, I got seriously into Henry Miller, just as I was about to join society. After I had recorded the backing track, the atmosphere, I went looking for something to add to it. This rant by Miller comes from a documentary where he is talking, well, actually ‘bitching’ about his days in New York as he walks about the ‘Old New York’ movie sets in a Hollywood studio. When I laid it in, I realized it seemed to be the perfect statement about New York today; how inflated real estate is making a life making art impossible, how so many old institutions are falling by the wayside. I mean, the man is long dead and still making a lot of sense to me!”

Longtime collaborator and Grammy Award winning engineer Bob Stander renders electric bass passages which slice through Cataldi’s bleeps, blips, boinks and wayward guitar motifs on the opening cut “Downtown Uptight,” another track abetted by visuals which fuse vintage 1960s discotheque images from the Whiskey A Go-Go and German television which synch perfectly with Stander’s Motown grooves.

Much of Spam was waxed aboard Cataldi’s floating residence known as The Houseboat Garlic Knot which is anchored somewhere “in the waters off the Big Apple.”

“In general, living on top of the water definitely has an impact on a person. It creates a chill and an ambiance, there are lots of interesting noises at night, seabirds, the squealing of the dock lines and docks, the sound of sail lines gently beating on masts. I think there’s a romanticism and Zen vibe that has certainly found its way into the music. The experiences... the diversity, I think what I learned about music, improvising, writing songs, creating environments and presenting a show have all come to fore in this album.”

Sal the confessional troubadour materializes in “Momma Called,” “A Girl Like You,” and “Wild One” a trio of shoegazing offerings which could have wooed Carly Simon from Cat Stevens all those years ago. We’ll never know. But at least we have Sketches of Spam.

Sketches of Spam by Spaghetti Eastern Music out now and available via CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and Rhapsody.

Sal Cataldi is live and in concert on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 at midnight at Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen Street, New York City; and Friday, October 16, 2015 at 8:00 PM at the KGB Bar Red Room Lounge with dancer Callista Zaki and poet William Lessard, 85 East 4th Street .

Sal Cataldi photos by Ivan Singer

Sketches of Spam album cover photo by William A. Loeb

PAT THOMAS LIBERATES ALLEN GINSBERG’S LAST WORD ON FIRST BLUES

This feature appeared in Huffington Post, May 2016

Here’s a guy whose recording career starts with Dylan and ends with a Beatle! To a younger person who does not really know Ginsberg, I would explain that he was one of the few counter cultural heroes that goes through three distinct decades, and three distinct movements. He is an iconic figure of The Beat Generation of the 1950s: the jazz, the poetry, and the cigarettes. He is an iconic figure of the 1960s: LSD, meditation, and rock music. And I would not exactly call him an iconic figure of the 1980s, but he was on stage and recording with The Clash (Combat Rock / 1982) and revered by many of the punks - especially the ‘punk poet’ Patti Smith. This was a guy who was not just one thing.

It’s not like “oh there goes the old beat guy...or there goes the old hippie guy...’ Allen Ginsberg was three guys...and if you fold in his gay rights work...if you fold in his anti-Vietnam work.... if you fold in his anti-Nixon work, Allen Ginsberg is larger than life. His work is as relevant now as it was 30,40, 50 years ago. And if you just review those first couple of lines of Howl, they are as iconic as any Dylan or Beatles lyric....”

Record collectors, vinyl geeks (myself included), hipster history devotees, and barstool musicologists, among additional permutations thereof, owe hosannas aplenty to the ongoing life labors of Pat Thomas. Perhaps his name does not resonate with the masses - which speaks much to the genuine value of his vocation as the true greats oft go unnoticed - however Pat’s extraordinary work as a writer, journalist, re-issue producer, author, essayist, musical archivist, socio-political historian, and musician - among other endeavors, is really the stuff of legend. Look him up! Read his remarkable, watershed book Listen Whitey-The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (Fantagraphics) which we discussed for Huffington Post in January 2014 - http://huff.to/1SsHfhe .

I first encountered Pat during my journalistic pursuit of the illustrious, albeit notorious, and mostly forgotten singer - backing vocalist Claudia Lennear, whom the world later became aware of by way of Morgan Neville’s magnificent Academy Award winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. Pat hooked me up with Claudia shortly after he commandeered the re-release of Lennear’s lost gem of a platter - Phew! My interview with Claudia can also be read on Huffington Post November 2013 (The Wonderfully Checkered Past of a Soul Rock Goddesshttp://huff.to/LrNFlz ). I cannot thank Pat enough for his selfless efforts on my behalf.

Mr. Thomas’ latest project is yet another essential addition to the literary and musical narration of these Unites States. The Last Word on First Blues is the first box set of Allen Ginsberg the “singer songwriter.”

The story for Pat started back in 1983 when he was watching MTV which, at the time, actually aired music videos and reported legitimate music news. Thomas heard about a collection of Allen Ginsberg singing his own compositions. “I immediately ran to my local record store and got the very last copy” he recalls with an air of victory in his voice that only true record geeks and collectors can appreciate. Note to younger readers: In better times, music retail outlets, as referred to by Mr. Thomas, were places where consumers paid for products known as records, cassettes, and compact discs.

The story for Ginsberg stretches back to the year 1971 wherein the poet called upon Bob Dylan, who had recently relocated back to Greenwich Village, to record songs that he’d written embracing a wide array of themes traversing homosexuality, politics, and governmental shenanigans, among other topics. At the time Dylan was somewhat off the radar, abandoning his albeit unintended “voice of a generation” status in favor of waxing rustic recordings, and no longer on the road, nor in the public eye. Apparently when Ginsberg said ‘jump,’ Dylan asked ‘how high!?”

Dylan, Ginsberg, along with Happy Traum (banjo), David Amram (horn, piano), and Arthur Russell, among others, commenced to recording Allen’s compositions- some of which saw the light of day when they were released as First Blues in 1983 thanks to John Hammond who issued them on his own imprint as the Columbia Records suits expectedly balked when they first heard Ginsberg’s most provocative libretto. That collection also included sessions from 1976 and 1981, with additional players including; Steve Taylor (guitar), Jon Sholle (guitar, double bass), and Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky (vocals, and lead vocal on “You Are My Dildo”), among others.

Fast forward to the 21st Century wherein Thomas, who had by then established a relationship with the Ginsberg family, was approached by Omnivore Records to expand on First Blues and Allen’s music; “the Ginsberg Estate gets thousands of letters praising his poetry. I was the one guy who writes to them praising the music. They turned me loose in his personal tape archive at Stanford! I spent years listening to hundreds of hours of Allen’s music...it was fun, entertaining, occasionally painful! You know, Allen recorded everything for his personal use- much of it was never intended for public consumption. But I just had to go through everything because I never knew when I was going to find real genius or something that had never made the final cut.”

The resulting collection is aptly entitled The Last Word on First Blues: a three CD set with eleven unissued songs from the ‘71 and ‘81 dates plus demos and live recordings (including a track with Don Cherry on kazoo), a full color 28 page booklet of rare photos (including a young Pat Thomas with Allen subtitled “The Punk Meets the Godfather”) and liner notes by Thomas which include insightful and informative interviews with a few of the core musicians.

“Ginsberg’s story as a poet has been told countless times, and many people have been interviewed on that topic. But no one has ever interviewed the musicians on the sessions. When I called Stephen Taylor, Allen’s longtime guitarist, to me it was like calling Keith Richards! The first thing I told him is that I wanted to be him through most of the 1980s. Another great interview was with David Amram. As a Jack Kerouac fan, he is already a legend in my book. And he’s been in many documentaries about Jack, but here is a guy who is almost 90 years old telling stories of hanging out with Dylan and Ginsberg in 1971 as if it happened yesterday.”

When Pat sent me the advance and I commenced to playing the tracks over and over, I was struck by how, to my ears, the collection reminded me of Dylan’s joyousBasement Tapes (1975) and expanded Basement Tapes Complete (2014). Ginsberg is ebullient throughout the recordings as are the other musicians. The passion, the humor, and the intensity of lyrics and melodies are irresistible - as I hope you will hear.

Pat concurs. “Oh yeah, Ginsberg could not be embarrassed! He may be the purest performer of all time. Allen could get up there and sing about homosexual activities when that was what he was in the mood for, he could show his vulnerability, especially in the song about his dad ‘Father Death Blues.’ If you listen to ‘CIA Dope Calypso’ he is out rapping the rappers! And what he sings is one hundred percent factually correct - Allen Ginsberg was a singing newspaper.”

“Ginsberg was a fan of everybody else, which you find true about a lot of the greatest musicians. I spent a weekend with Al Kooper, and one of the reasons why he got into music was so he could meet and hang out with everybody else- and he did! Sure, Allen had a big ego, but he was also the guy who spent years trying to get Kerouac published. He tried to get all of his buddies on the map even before he was necessarily on the map, Allen was a very giving guy.” 

When Thomas asked permission from Dylan’s camp regarding the release of new material - Bob’s people got back to him in 48 hours, a rarity for superstars of Dylan’s stature. “We’re in! Anything for Allen Ginsberg was their response” beams Thomas.

The Beatle reference to which Pat referred to occurred in the mid-1990s when Allen visited Paul McCartney at his home in England. Noting that he was planning to give a reading with Anne Waldman and various poets at the Royal Albert Hall and was seeking an accompanist for “The Ballad of Skeletons,” Sir Paul immediately offered his services. Macca and Ginsberg performed together at the famed venue. The song was later recorded and released and featured Lenny Kaye, who also produced the track and played bass, along with Phillip Glass on keyboards, Marc Ribot and David Mansfield on guitars, and Macca on drums, guitar, and organ.

“This set is essential for all Ginsberg fans, and a great bookend to Howl,” says Thomas, “especially for newcomers. You get a complete overview of the work of Allen Ginsberg - from his first great work to something that stands among his final major works.”

The Last Word on First Blues is out now on Omnivore Recordings and is available in CD and Digital formats at music retail.

For more information on The Last Word on First Blues please visit www.OmnivoreRecordings.com

The Last Word on First Blues was produced for release by Pat Thomas.

The Last Word on First Blues liner notes by Pat Thomas.

For more information on Pat Thomas please visit www.facebook.com/pat.thomas.18

Allen Ginsberg The Last Word on First Blues Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvVTyZK-bFA

Allen Ginsberg photo by Greg Allen.